“Apologies, my friend, but this is as far as you travel with me.”
“What have you done? What nonsense is this? Some wretched Jesuit plot.”
“More that fabled Jesuit gold to which you alluded, Doctor. The Society has never feared the power of lucre, like some others. But you will come no further with me, Dr. Falcon. Ahead lies the Arquipelago das Anavilhanas, which Manoel tells me is a mapless maze of ever-shifting sand bars and lagoons. I have instructed your crew to make camp on an island for five days. In that time I will have so far outstripped your expedition that you will never find me. My friend, it is not safe for you to go with me, and to be truthful, my own misssion may lead me to actions that I would not wish witnessed by one outside my Order. Neither was it safe, even for you, to remain in São José Tarumás. But in the Anavilhanas, no one will ever find you.” Quinn lifted the Frenchman’s sword from the bottom of the pirogue and offered it to him. “This is your weapon, not mine; and if I do not have it, Grace of Our Lady I shall not be tempted to use it.” He tossed the sword; Falcon caught it lightly in his two hands. The canoes rocked on the still water, all bound together in the dark currrent. “Argument is futile, my dear friend, against Jesuit authority, and Jesuit gold.” Quinn nodded to his indio pilot; paddles dipped, the pirogue drew away from the helpless Falcon. “I must confess a further crime against you, Doctor, though, as I have returned your sword, it is more in the nature of a trade. Your device, your Governing Engine; in this land it would become a tool of the grossest human subjugation conceivable. Forgive me; I have removed it from your baggage, together with the plans. It is an evil thing.”
“Quinn, Quinn!” Falcon shouted. “My engine, my Governing Engine, what did you do with it, you faithless blackrobe?”
“Look for me around the mouth of the Rio Branco,” Quinn called back, and the river carried them apart until the pirogue, pitifully small and fragile against the green wall of the várzea, was lost among the narrow mud-choked channels.
Only when the sudden clap of flighting birds or the soft clop of a jumping fish or the sun brilliant in the diamond of a water-bead dropping from paddle-tip summoned him did Father Luis Quinn start from rapture to find that hours had passed in the reverie of the river. He had ceased counting the days since the parting at Anavilhanas; morning followed morning like a chain of pearls, the great dawn chorus of the forest, then the run out into the misty water and the time-devouring stroke of the paddles; the simple sacrament of physical work. No need, no desire for speech. Never in all his disciplines and exercises had Quinn found so easy and complete a submergence of the self into the other. The indolent slide of jacaré into the water; the sudden scatter of capybara as the pirogue entered a marshy furo between river loops, noses and tiny ears held above the surface; the dash of a toucan across the channel, a nestling in its outlandish beak, pursued by the plundered mother. Once — had he imagined, had he truly beheld? — the wide prideful eyes of the solitary jaguar, kneeling warily at a salt lick. Their unthinking, animal actions were of one with the automatic obedience of his muscles to the paddle. In physicality is true subjugation of the self.
On and on and on. As Quinn’s spirit went outward into the physical world, as often it was cast backward. Memory became entangled with reality. Luis Quinn knelt not in the waist of a pirogue, a frail shave of bark, but stood at the taff-rail of a Porto carrack beating for the Spanish Gate of Galway under a spring sky of swift, gray-bottomed shower-heavy clouds. Fifteen years and his first return since childhood; he had thought he would barely remember the old language, but as Suibhne the captain led him from warehouse to port-merchants to tavern and the men had greeted him like a sea-divided relative, he found the grammar and idiom, the words and blessings swinging into place like the timbers of a house. Seamus Óg Quinn’s son; big strapping lad he grew up to be, grand to see a Quinn back among his old people and lands. Again, recollection: the great hall on the upper floor of the casa in Porto; Pederneiras the tutor taking him by the hand down from the schoolroom on the top floor to this great, light-filled hall lowering with allegories of wealth, and power crowning the merchants and navigators of Porto. As he had peered down through the colonnaded window into the rattling street, Pederneiras had opened a long, narrow shagreen-bound case. Within, bound in baize, the blades. “Go, take one, feel it, adore it.” Luis Quinn’s hand dropped around the hilt and a thrill burned up his arm, a belly-fire, a hardening and pressing he now knew as sexual, a feeling that twenty years disstant, kneeling in supplication, still stirred him physically.
“I see you need no encouragement from me, Senhor Luis,” Pederneiras had said, observing the precocious pride in his pupil’s breeches. “Now, the garde.”
Bright metal in his hand once again, the flattened silver of a stout tankard, crushed by repeated blows to the skull of a man. The master has commanded me to serve you no more. Still his body remembered that deep, exultant joy. Luis Quinn turned the disciplines of his exercise to expunge the luxuurious memory of sin. Preparatory prayer: ask of Christ his grace that all intentions, actions, and works may be directed to his greater glory. First point: the sin of the angels. Naked they were, and innocent, dwelling in a paradise of bounty and clemency, yet still in their forests and great rivers the Enemy corrupted them. They consumed human flesh, they rejoiced in the meat of their enemies, and so we condemned them as pagan, animal, without soul or spirit, fit only for slavery. In so doing we condemned ourselves. Second point: the sin of old Adam. Quinn’s memory turned from the battered shell of metal in his fist to the smashed skull on the floor. He heard again the hooting animal howls of his friends cheering him on through the fire of lust and drink. Third point: the sin of the soul condemned through mortal vice. Father Diego Gonçalves, what do you know of him? Manoel the pilot, a diligent altar boy, dared say nothing against the Church, but his hunched shoulders and bowed head, as if cowering from the vastness of the Rio Negro, spoke old dread to Luis Quinn. Zemba, a freed slave who since his manumission at Belém had worked his way up the river to the rumors of an El Dorado in the immensity beyond São José Tarumás, a land of future where his history would be forrgotten. The City of God , he said. The kingdom of heaven is built there.
Luis Quinn turned the three sins beneath his contemplation and saw that they were indivisible: the pride of kings, the pride of the spirit, the pride of power. Now I understand why you sent me, Father James. Conclude the meditation with the Paternoster. But as the comfortable words formed the river exploded around him, dashing him from contemplation: botos, in their dozens, spearing through the water around the pirogue, curving up through the surface to gasp in air, some bursting free from their element entirely in an ecstatic leap. Quinn’s heart leaped in wonder and joy; then, as he followed a flying, twisting boto to the zenith of its arc, to wordless awe. Angels moved over the várzea, striding across the forest canopy, their feet brushing the treetops. Angels carmine and gold, Madonna blue and silver, angels bearing harps and psalteries, drums and maracas, swords and double-curved warbows: the host of heaven. We strive not against men but against principalities and powers.
The pirogue shot clear from the narrow gut of the furo to rejoin the main channel, and Quinn involuntarily rose to his feet in wonder. From bank to bank the channel was black with canoes; men perched in the stern driving their bobbing wooden shells onward, women and children in the waist. Some were entirely crewed by grinning, spray-wet children. At the center of the great fleet rose the object of Quinn’s awe. A basilica sailed the river. Nave, chancel, apses, buttresses, and clerestory; in every detail a church from the wooden-shingled dome to the crucifix between its two towers. Every inch of the basilica was covered in carved, painted reliefs of the gospels and the catechisms, the martyrdoms of saints and the stoopings of angels; the illumination caught and kindled in the westering light as radiantly as any rose window. Each wooden roof-slat was painted with the representation of a flower. Figures stood on the railed balcony above the porch, tiny as insects. Insect was the image caught in Quinn’s reeling mind; the great church seemed to stride across the water on a thousand spindle legs. A second, colder look revealed them to be a forest of sweeps propelling the towering edifice down the channel. The basilica did not move by human muscle alone; the finials of the wall-buttresses had been extended into masts slung with yardage and brown, palm-cloth sail; the towers too bore sprits, stays, and banners. One pennant was figured with Our Lady and child, the other a woman, standing on one foot, her body entwined with forest vines and flowers. Naked red bodies patterned black with genipapo swarmed the ropes and ratlines. Then Luis Quinn’s attention rose to the mastheads. Each mast was capped with a titanic carving of an angeclass="underline" trumpet, harp, lozenge-bladed sword, shield, and castanets. Their faces were those of the people of the canoes: high-cheeked, narrow-eyed, black-haired Rio Negro angels.